You: "Alright, I'll unhook the wood nymph's bra."DM: "Okay, how do you do that?"[rest of gaming group listens intently]You: "Umm...I just, you know, unhook it?"DM: "Okay, we'll say it takes three rounds."You: "It doesn't take three rounds to unhook a bra!"DM: "Well, it takes your character three rounds."You: "That's bullshit. Have you ever done it?"DM: "SILENCE! YOU ARE BANISHED FROM DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS FOREVER!"

I don't think any of them cared that I did it one hand vs two hands...they just cared that I did it quickly. Being able to unhook a bra while having the other hand free to do...uh...other things was nice though:)

Of course, the danger of trying to do it with one hand was if you screwed up or if they had a really wonky bra, suddenly you had to bring your other hand into the equation. That was impossible to do without looking like a moron. If you already started with two hands, that's fine...but if you started with one and ended with two, that meant you thought you were cooler than you actually were -_-;;

Start with your right arm behind the wearer. Make sure your thumb is on the reinforced section holding the clasp, behind the clasp, on the side to your right. Your index and middle finders should be in a similar position on your left. Squeeze your thumb and the index and middle finger towards each other, while also pressing slightly in (towards you) with your arm. The bra should now be unhooked.

Placing the hand such that the forefinger is bent against the section of the bra closest to the back and the thumb is over the piece in the foreground with the hooks, slide in the detaching direction with the thumb.

Alternatively, just ask her to take it off for you... but that may be a problem if you didn't actually know the girl on the bus in the first place.

You do realize that some of them have FOUR hooks, right? Sure it is easy on the one or two hook models for the smaller chested women. But on the 4 hook models for the larger chested - I defy you to do it with one hand in one "move"...

1) Turn one face 45 degrees2) Pry upward on one middle edge piece until it pops out3) Remove all edge and corner pieces4) Put the cube back together, but flip exactly 1 edge piece5) Give it to someone who knows how to solve it6) Laugh maniacally when they just can't seem to get that last piece where it belongs.

I know it won't stem the tide, but this is good research. I'm sure there are a million other algorithms in the world that can benefit from this. Shortcuts they had to invent to make sure they were using minimal processing time, full understanding of how much money and time it really took to get this process done to make other projects more practical, etc etc. This sort of thinking, even if silly on its own, has a broad range of applications.

To answer that question, you need to ask whether there is something inherently special about the “solved” state.

Or, to put it differently:

1) Begin in state A2) Re-arrange stickers into a corresponding state X, such that state A maps directly to state X in a particular transformation system3) Solve from state X to S (max. 20 moves)4) Re-arrange stickers using the same transformation system in reverse, obtaining state B, which mapped to state S in that transformation system

Note that the arrangement is not fully arbitrary: there are some arrangements which it is impossible to reach. Not only of the stickers, either (everyone knew that you could make a cube unsolvable by moving the stickers around, right?): it is possible without moving any of the stickers to arrange the pieces themselves in such a way that it is impossible to reach the solved state without taking the cube apart again.

However, among reachable arrangements, your statement is valid. I suspect you probably knew th

I got a team working on solving Rubik's cube in 1 move.The proof only need 30 years of computering to be proven, however as we only got one computer we won't release is before 2040 (and then we'll claim we were that close to the solution, but due to a timestamp bug we had to restart from scratch in 2038).

Actually 1 move isn't hard, because there are only 12 possible moves, thus 12^1 = 12 permutations. It does not take much processing power to find one rubik's cube that none of the 12 permutations will solve.

In fact, Schroedinger's cat story was meant to show that quantum physics was just a model, and particles were not really in two different states simultaneously. But most people understood it the wrong way, and now most mentions of the cat experiment promote the oposite idea of what was the initial goal.

How about measuring that in actual computer usage? X MHz on Y cores per Z nodes over A hours? Or at least say it would have taken one X MHz processor 35 years to compute it. Computer-hours are nothing line man-hours or horse-power. At least those have good limits to their vagueness. Computer-time might as well be arthropod-lengths (are we talking dust mites or ancient giant sea-scorpions?).

Except clock-cycles, which is what you get from your equation, is also not a good measurement of "computer usage".

However, Google Tech Talks had a rather nice explanation of the algorithm and core mechanics for solving the problem a couple of years ago. Quite interesting for anyone in supercomputing, or just plain old curiosity.

They give the distance and number of positions for the cube here:
http://www.cube20.org/ [cube20.org]
What I don't understand is why they have only approximate number 20 moves - from the article on the link above I understand that they solved all of the 20-moves combinations so they must know the exact number of those combinations

I believe the article said their solution algorithm did not search for optimal solutions, only for those that are 20 moves or less. (It has already been proven that there exist positions that can not be solved in less than 20 moves)
So, they can probably give an upper bound on the number of positions solvable in 20 moves, but not an exact number.

They quit testing moves when they found a solution in 20 moves for a given starting state. This means they don't know if a given starting state requires 20 moves. There may be an 18-move solution that they missed.

No, they've proved that the superflip (the position where all the edge pieces are flipped and the corners and centers are in place) is 20 face turns from solved. Thus before this new work it was already known that the general solution required at least 20 face turns, and this work says that 20 is sufficient. So 20 it is!

I wouldn't say they're cheating, but I am a bit dissatisfied with their way of counting moves. Rotating a face by 180 degrees is not an elementary move to me. I'd like to know god's number in elementary moves.

They are just different metrics. What you're talking about is the quarter turn metric, and this proof is about the face turn metric. There is apparently a position that is known to be a distance 26 quarter turns from solved, so your answer would be at least 26.

35 years is about 300k core-hours, a standard measure of computing resources. This is a big pile of computer time, but is not unreasonable.

So how much does this cost?

A typical supercomputer, Ranger [utexas.edu], cost $59 million to build and operate for four years. It's got about 60k cores, so $59 million delivers 240k core-years; they used 35 core-years to do this computation. Doing the division, you get $9000 of computer time -- not all that bad. Plugging in the cost numbers for another production supercomputer, Kraken [sciencedaily.com], gives a slightly lower cost.

Actually, this is a much more important result than the summary claims. Until now, there was always a gap between the proved lower bound and upper bound on necessary moves. They now proved that the known lower bound (20, proved in 1995) is also an upper bound (ie. there is no position which requires 21 or more moves to solve) and thus concluded research that lasted for 30 years.

This article could very well be listed on the Slashdot main page, it has nothing to do in Idle. The algorithms that were designed during this research are nothing to laugh at and will surely advance other research fields as well.

Actually, I was at a high-performance physics computing conference this summer in which a genetic oncologist talked about some of the computational challenges in cancer genomics and said, basically, "There's lots of room over here if you physics folks want something else to chew on." It won't be cured by brute-force computing alone, but there are certainly computational challenges where a few million core-hours would be welcome.

The computational resources are available. If the researcher needs clock time, he can talk to the folks at TeraGrid [teragrid.org], among others. Of course, the researcher you mentioned was doing something similar to what OP wants, although more politely and probably the "correct" way, which is to try to get people who are working on problem X to work on cancer instead. At least the oncologist was "walking the walk" in that he is actually working on his topic of interest instead of just complaining that there is no cure f

"It's a problem that can't be prevented" and "it's a problem that can't be solved" are two rather different things. So it's caused by undesirable mutations as a result of radiation/chemicals/viruses... doesn't mean we can't fix it once it happens. That being more or less the definition of a cure - a fix you apply to a disease after you already have that disease.

I doubt we'll ever have a vaccine for cancer, for the reasons you mentioned, but a cure... a cure could be achieved.

Yes, you're right, we should devote all our time to getting ourselves to live longer, and none of our time to making our lives more interesting and enjoyable. That'll make a lovely world, won't it.

That's what the lifestyle police are pushing for.

Eat food that tastes like cardboard, run like rabbits, and take pills based on how long they'll help you live (never mind quality of life - e.g. so hormone therapy for women is out - can't have 1 more heart attack per hundered even if it makes life bearable for the other 99) and you'll live longer or at least it will feel like it.

There's a movement in health research now geared at extending what they call "healthspan" rather than just "lifespan" -- not "how long does this dude keep breathing", but "how long can we keep this dude active and happy"?

Turns out that many of the things that make people live longer also make their late years healthier. My grandfather is 94 and still travels the world with his girlfriend (a spry young 75, but he'll never see her again now that she's taken up Farmville). He got prostate cancer a few years ago (and colon cancer a few decades ago), received aggressive treatment for it, and is now cancer-free and healthy.

Old does not *have* to mean feeble. Sometimes it does, of course, and that's bad; this is why we should look at healthspan rather than lifespan.

Indeed... once you pop one of the corners out with a flathead screwdriver, the rest come out pretty easily.
The bad part is that after a few times doing this, the plastic becomes a bit worn and the edges won't hold the cubes in as well. It becomes patently obvious that the cube has been disassembled; a few more times and the cube starts to fall apart when turned and twisted normally.
Or maybe I just got cheap models as a kid.

Thank God! And cancer? Still unsolved. I'll bet computer time could be used for that too. (sorry, bullsh*t like this hits very close to home for me recently. Nothing like having people dying, and then hearing how we are using resources for utter crap)

I don't think the limiting factor in cancer research is lack of computer time. If it were something so simple, getting the resources wouldn't be a problem.

That's where you are wrong. There is a lack of resources, funding, and computers cycles. There have been cycles running for years. I know cancer researchers, and I've donated time, money, and my computer cycles

While all research could use more funding, cancer research has to be one of the best-funded research fields out there. It's either that or defense. It lacks funding like I lack funding because I can't buy a mansion.

Could you be more specific as to what those cycles were for? I'm guessing they were for protein folding, which is essential and good research but is not going to directly find a cure. If google had run all it's computers on protein folding, we'd likely be only marginally closer to a cure for cancer.

The limiting factor in cancer research is -not- computing time. A bigger one is the fact that there are many different types of cancer, and the biggest one is that it's incredibly difficult to kill millions of any one type of cell without killing a lot of other cells in a human body. For most of our history, we had no idea how to specifically kill bacterial cells in a human body. It's still an issue.

Great job though moderators, bump up misinformation. You'd rage too if you were 34 and had to deal with this shit. And watch, I'll get marked as Troll again, even though I'm not and have a great post history. Whatever.

You're also going to get modded troll because you were asking for it. If you're 34 you should have at some point learned how to calm down and not take things so seriously.

Thank God!
And cancer? Still unsolved. I'll bet computer time could be used for that too.
(sorry, bullsh*t like this hits very close to home for me recently. Nothing like having people dying, and then hearing how we are using resources for utter crap)

Guess you should be using your spare cycles to help cure cancer. Lead by example instead of using your resources for the utter crap that is posting on slashdot!

My condolences for your loss, but do you really believe that Google would have found the cure for cancer by now if only they hadn't spent time on this? Big achievements are incremental; someday we might turn this into something bigger or we'll find out it was a waste of time, but it shouldn't be hated simply for being done. How many people here would love to find a way to solve a Rubik's cube in 19 moves? Would you give them the same reaction?

From the article (www.cube20.org): "Google does not release information on their computer systems, but it would take a good desktop PC (Intel Nehalem, four-core, 2.8GHz) 1.1 billion seconds, or about 35 CPU years, to perform this calculation."

Obviously the "computer" is one of Google's datacenter machines, which you could equate to a modern enterprise level server. Being too specific doesn't help nearly as much as you think it does. Furthermore:

Finally, we were able to distribute the 55,882,296 cosets of H among a large number of computers at Google and complete the computation in just a few weeks. Google does not release information on their computer systems, but it would take a good desktop PC (Intel Nehalem, four-core, 2.8GHz) 1.1 billion seconds, or about 35 CPU years, to perform this calculation.

From the article. They are guessing based on a known configuration how long it would take.